As processors increase their processing capabilities, one concern is the speed at which memory may be accessed by a processor. For example, to process data, a processor may need to first fetch data from a memory. After completion of the processing, the results may need to be stored in the memory. Therefore, the memory speed can have a direct effect on overall system performance.
Another important consideration is power consumption. For example, in mobile computing devices that rely on battery power, it is very important to reduce power consumption to allow for the device to operate while mobile. Power consumption is also important for non-mobile computing devices as excess power consumption may increase costs (e.g., due to additional power usage, increasing cooling requirements, etc.), shorten component life, limit locations at which a device may be used, etc.
Hard disk drives provide a relatively low cost storage solution and are used in many computing devices to provide non-volatile storage. Disk drives however use relatively a lot of power when compared to flash memory since a disk drive needs to spin its disks at a relatively high speed and move disk heads relative to the spinning disks to read/write data. All this physical movement generates heat and increases power consumption. To this end, higher end mobile devices are migrating towards utilizing flash memory devices that are non-volatile. Also, some flash memory devices may provide higher access speeds and data transfer rates than hard disk drives.
NAND memory is a type of flash memory that is non-volatile. NAND memory may be used in memory cards, flash drives, solid-state drives, and similar products. However, flash memory has a limitation on the number of times the information in a memory cell may be rewritten before it becomes unusable, or a finite number of program-erase cycles (typically written as P/E cycles).